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Mining your past to justify your terminal care: the idea of a ‘retrospective QALY’
There is no end to human suffering. There is a distinct end to the amount of money that governments will spend on reducing it. Someone has to make decisions about healthcare resource allocation. I am very glad it’s not me. Many tools are used in the decision-making process. Not many emerge well from a viva
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Creating Headlines, Artificial Life, Ethical Concerns, and Ontological Perplexity
Synthetic biology has been catapulted into the public sphere after an article in Science reported that Craig Venter and his collaborators had managed to make a synthetic cell by inserting a fabricated genome into a bacterium. The achievement made headlines and was widely presented as a case of creating artificial life. Already there has been debate about
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Should Believers Trust Atheists?
The Science and Religious Conflict Project team here at Oxford has recently finished hosting a major international conference on Religion, Tolerance and Intolerance (For details see: http://www.bep.ox.ac.uk/archive_events_data/religion_and_tolerance_conference_may_2010). The conference involved a large number of very interesting papers by eminent scholars across a range of disciplines. One that particularly peaked my interest was a paper on
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Views and interviews on addiction
Nigel Warburton interviews Walter Sinnot Armstrong and Julian Savulescu on addiction Addiction – Sinnot-Armstrong and Savulescu
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Are addicts addicts?
by Nick Shackel I think it would be fair to say that, insofar as people think about it at all, most people think that being an addict is a property some people have. Just like people can be tall or friendly or wealthy, people can be addicts. Some people even think that being an addict
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The Fiction of Affliction in Addiction
by Julian Savulescu Walter argues that addiction is: 1. a disorder of self-control that comes in degrees. It is essentially pathological self-control, like compulsive hand-washing, where the addict has limited control in some circumstances but not enough self-control. 2. a mental disease. Bennett Foddy and I have argued that while addicts may have poor self-control
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Is “playing God” just a meaningless phrase?
In a recent piece for Prospect magazine, Philip Ball denounces the “playing God” objection, often made against some proposed uses of biotechnology, as a “meaningless, dangerous cliché”. More specifically, Ball mentions the objection in relation to Craig Venter’s creation – already discussed on this blog – of the first microorganism with a wholly synthetic genome.
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Are addicts responsible? Leverhulme lecture 25/5/10
Professor Walter Sinnot-Armstrong gave a Leverhulme lecture last night on the question of addiction and responsibility. Click on the image or the link below to download or view a pdf of his presentation. "Are addicts responsible?" Listen to the podcast
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Addiction special edition
We will have more blog posts relating to the ethics of addiction and Walter Sinnot Armstrong's talk over the next 24 hours, but here are a number of related papers by members of the centre provided here as a library resource (UPDATED 26/5/10)
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Chillin’ with the Texas Board of Education
The Texas Board of Education recently approved changes to the state's high school social studies curriculum. The Board also has responsibility for reviewing and approving textbooks for use in Texas schools according to whether they meet its curriculum standards, so its move will effectively force textbook publishers to revise their presentation of American history. The